I can sit here and read online about a Mega El Niño
and the collapse of the AMOC
and worry myself sick that
climate change is going to destroy the world,
or I can go outside and tend to my small part of it.
Who’s with me?
Yes, these are all my own words*. No AI, no outsourcing, no plagiarising or copying.
Might explain a few things.
But, nonetheless – annoying as it is that I have to say this – all my novels, poetry, short stories, drabbles, blog posts and non-fiction… are entirely my own work.
Have a great day.
*Artwork, on the other hand, is sourced from artists, not AI. I try to find art produced in traditional ways, including digital design, to illustrate the posts on here, and I make sure to attribute the art properly when I can.
Late to the equinox. The world spins on, unperturbed. My eye is taken beyond borders to observe where calamity and injustice reign, amid lies and ugly behaviours. And yet.
While parts of the world boil and others burn…
While the probability of future hardship increases for those of us not currently enduring, and will worsen for those of us beset…
While many of us are struggling, day to day, one way or another…
Know this:
There are still parts of the world where wild bees visit apple blossom in a quiet, sunny garden.
May this message find you equally blessed.
Did you think I’d let this anniversary pass without notice :-)?
Tail end of January 2020. Where were you? What were you thinking?
I have notes. I don’t need to remind myself, but maybe the disruption that quickly followed wasn’t as harsh for me as it was for others. I’m talking, of course, about the appearance of NCoV-SARS-2, later referred to as COVID-19, more commonly now as just COVID – if it’s mentioned by name at all.
2020. Handily, the zero at the end of the year means we can use it as a Year Zero for the COVID pandemic. Makes every later year of the pandemic so far easy to remember. We’re about to enter Year Six.
But this also means we are looking at the seventh year of mass infection. The earlier years of mass avoidance are long gone. Some corners of the internet still host those of us who still avoid the infection, but mostly it’s faded into the rear view mirror of humanity’s motoring journey like so much roadside scenery.
In a way, this is also how I live now. I’m still cautious about infection, and wear an FFP3 respirator/mask when indoor spaces are essential, but I no longer concern myself that passing pedestrians will infect me on my daily walks. In the early times, this wasn’t immediately clear. I still keep to myself, and those communal parts of life I once enjoyed are history. In many ways I’m healthier without. In other ways, I’m probably not. Time will tell.
What of plagues fictional? What of life with, or after, a global pandemic? When COVID first appeared, so did the memes – referencing films like World War Z and 28 Days Later, the irony of zombie hordes that our protagonists flee from somehow lost on the viewers who chose to be infected instead.
Fewer were the memes of Children of Men or The Girl With All The Gifts. Long time coming, those stories, and not so amusing.
Often the classic post-apocalyptic novels show an empty world almost like a paradise, as if the mass die-off our heroes survive is somehow cleansing. Earth Abides is one of these, a conveniently benevolent climate helping our hero survive a USA destroyed. The Death of Grass starts somewhat earlier, our hero and his family fleeing across England to the North – it’s always northwards – avoiding hordes of starving looters in towns and cities while they pootle across the cropless countryside to a Lakeland haven.
Communities arise, some militaristic, some monastic, none of them particularly kind to women who are expected to breed profusely in a society reduced to pre-modern medical sophistication. I’ve not read any of those stories written by women, by mothers in real life, if such stories exist. Historical fiction such as The White Queen show us how women actually coped, as does historical data. Grim isn’t the half of it.
Perhaps it isn’t wise to take fictional – entertainment – plagues and their survival as a guide to how our lives should pan out in the real world. One common thread that comedians used to point out was that no future plague-zombie story can be truly accurate without including the large mass of participants who simply shrug and shoulder their way into crowded spaces to have fun regardless. Some of us, it seems, simply can’t live without being surrounded by others – the way fish can’t survive without water.
Splendid isolation isn’t sustainable for long either. You need other people to bring you food, or the ingredients thereof, that you can’t grow or forage for yourself. Garden writer Carol Deppe points out that humans are trading creatures, keen to share and explore and meet up for merriment while exchanging surplus goods. These days those who supply our needs are far away, a long trade route hence, the last leg done by minivan from the supermarket.
Most people, it seems, are somewhere in the middle. Those with children at school, indoor work, communal hobbies and close-knit family and friends, all must make a judgement on how they want to live their lives. Sometimes there isn’t much choice. I know my life would be different if… if… but it isn’t.
And what about you, dear reader? Are you still keeping yourself in, safe from crowds and their infected breath, watching the world move on like Year Zero never happened? Or have you joined the throngs of those who dance and sing and live like the Before Times because [their] life would be sterile and dusty and penniless without?
We’ve been here before. History shows us many outcomes. There may not be a choice of which we follow.
Tick-tock. The clock of doom for us all never sleeps.
Good grief, is that the time (of year)?
Tradition dictates that I offer a list of five film recommendations for the holiday period.
I prefer my heroes in tweed, my heroines likewise. I choose films that may be old, or odd, or quiet. Films that have neither thrills nor spills – and definitely no comic-book superheroes.
Posts from previous years are listed at the end of this one.
Here we go:
1. The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (2021)
How does the smooth Benedict Cumberbatch manage to transform himself into the quirky and unusual Louis Wain, his pencil always sketching and his brain always on fire? A sort-of-comedy biopic of a late 19th century artist and oddball, this will probably make you laugh, and cry, and sometimes marvel at the skills of actors and film-makers to produce a film quite so eccentric and endearing.
https://kentfilmoffice.co.uk/filmed-in-kent/2021/12/the-electrical-life-of-louis-wain-2022/
2. That They May Face the Rising Sun (2023)
The landscape of Ireland is the carpet on which this film takes flight, in all its green and soggy majesty. A not-quite-young couple settle in a small village in retreat from a busier life, leading us through a semi-rural year with a thread linking back overseas, to other responsibilities, and a choice that’s made – or is it? Set in the 1980s, but not as brightly-lit, the film has all the charm of The Banshees of Inisherin without any of the amputations.
quietly affecting, funny and filled with a stunningly subtle exploration of life’s hardships… a film for those with the patience to appreciate its slowly unfolding layers as you’re welcomed into this endearing community, filled with delightful characters, who are brought to life by a pitch-perfect cast.
Review on FilmCarnage
(Trailer – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHsLFFHKUr4)
3. The Winter Guest (1997)
Emma Thompson stars alongside her real-life mother, Phyllida Law, bickering wholeheartedly while an unnatural cold spell has frozen the sea and turned every footstep into a risk. Meanwhile, two elderly women attend a stranger’s funeral, mainly for the tea and cake and the ride on a warm bus.
Film4 Production describe this film, directed by famous screen baddie Alan Rickman, thusly:
“Set upon the shores of a picturesque Scottish seaside town, in the icy depths of winter. The Winter Guest is a moving, funny and tender story about life, love and the need to feel wanted.”
For a plot summary, try the late Roger Ebert (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-winter-guest-1998).
4. Yesterday (2019)
What if nobody had ever heard of The Beatles – except you? Especially if you were a fan, and an aspiring musician, and – ooh – suddenly the entire back catalogue of John/Paul/George/Ringo is yours for the taking. Hmm? Go on, admit it, you would, wouldn’t you?
Well, that’s the exact premise of this film with an endearing cast list that includes a good few cameo appearances and a soundtrack of all-time crackers. I’m not a Beatles fan myself, but I did enjoy this. Nice bit at the end too with Sarah Lancashire.
“a wide-eyed musical fairy tale”
Variety Magazine review (their reviewer is somewhat nonplussed)
5. Stiff Upper Lips (1997)
A comedy to round off the list! Stiff Upper Lips takes aim at all those Edwardian period dramas made popular by Merchant-Ivory, the private-school boys and corseted girls, their elders in aspic frightfully strict. The cast list is full of actors who may even have made their names playing in the very films this takes aim at – including Peter Ustinov, who is always a delight to watch, the acid Prunella Scales and her real-life son and all-round good egg Samuel West.
Time Out described it as “Spiffing!” (which isn’t as rude as you think it is)
That’s all for this year’s suggestions. Previous years:
Five Quiet Films for Yuletide 2021
Five Festive Films For Yuletide – Again
Five more unusual films for Yuletide
Five Unusual Films for Yuletide
Hope your festive period is as wild, or as quiet, as you wish.
After months when I deemed it unwise, I trod the woodland path again. Soft underfoot, not yet impassable, the surface of autumn’s leaves studded with hawthorn’s sturdy berries. At dusk I almost have the place to myself. Wild birds call their day’s last message; light fades over the bare trees to the west, high clouds shading to rose, then lavender.
All summer I walked the riverside path and watched the water fall away from the banks. Not as dry as previous years, but not replenished. Mud-banks appeared, thronged with waterfowl shaking their feathers at the sky. Once, like a rip in the waterside grasses exposing some interstellar darkness, the sinuous shadow of a mink slid over the lip of the bank and vanished into the ground. The geese saw it too, and made no warning sound.
Now the tail of the year approaches and traditionally I’d summarise my progress, or lack of it, on projects writing and otherwise. Not this year.
I asked, “Where might I be in a few years’ time? Ten? Five? What would I like to fill my diminishing time on this planet with?” in homage, in part, to Mary Oliver. I found this snippet in response.
Curled into winter now like a wasp in the woodpile, we wait for season’s prime. Dark mornings foster late rising. Dusk comes before four, earlier if it’s gloomy or wet. The curtains are drawn, the fire is lit, there have been mince pies made and greedily devoured.
The last apples still cling to the tiniest trees. We’ve had a harsh frost, that did for the tomato plants pretending to be hardy in the outdoor beds long after they should have died. A couple of Named Storms have whipped the neighbour’s pampas grass, as usual, the flags of their flower-stalks broken, still defiantly waving.
On my walk I mused on winter weather – especially at Christmas time – and our expectations of the weather. Starry evenings where the breath mists in clouds; thick snow cloaking the landscape, swaddling sheep on the hills and smoothing out the corrugations of ploughed fields.
Unlikely, this century.
Our festive TV adverts seem less snowy than before. I wonder whether that’s a sign. Climate change begins to alter how we view the world around us, our Christmas traditions soaked in Dickens and Victorian values now obsolete. This house was built for colder days; their like we’ll not see, mostly, in the future.
I’ve spent some time on Zooniverse where various projects seek to digitise historic climate records.
Old logbooks from ships that plied the Indian Ocean (Monsoon Voyages); the river levels of 19th-century Italy, or the rainfall of famine-time Ireland.
A project to digitise long-lost files of weather data from across Africa, the place-names suffixed by old imperial ownership into countries that no longer exist, the data just as ghostly and more pertinent than ever to the people of those nations now the damage done in our name comes to harry them with havocs wet and dry.
All the previous experience I gained from work come to the fore. A friend describes using her background in paid employment to support the growth of her hobby group, an unseen gift that maybe wasn’t valued by colleagues at the time. Some good may come from all the times we were opposed, undermined, ignored, just trying to do a task the organisation wanted and that no-one else would touch.
Those days are gone now. I’ll not miss them. If ever I return to work, the keenness has gone, the ambition. I’ll think twice about putting my head in the lion’s jaws again. And when the world of work is grim and riven, everything that seems like work gets kicked aside.
While I miss the discipline of a regular posting, and missed catching up on the news of strangers across the miles, I don’t miss the feel of a looming deadline with nothing to say, or the scraping sound on the inside of my skull as my brain tries to glean a post from an everyday conversation or a random internet find.
The online theft that is AI continues elsewhere. According to Charles Stross, few bots or spiders bother to lift content from the internet for free any more – it’s all been taken, thanks so much, no more required to generate our own.
When self-publishing began, a rash of books erupted that were simply articles lifted from Wikipedia to make money from common knowledge, or nonsense books generated at random for money-laundering. Now, it seems the systems write their own, an endless circle of slop out of slop, that keeps money and attention in the loop. The product isn’t the item for sale: it’s the human, searching online for quality and finding only advertising slots.
I’ve simplified my life this summer. Un-subscribed from places where I don’t remember asking. No, I don’t think I’ll buy any more of your stuff. Even less if you keep pestering me with emails stapped full of byte-heavy images. Not all of us care for – or indulge in – limitless sharing.
Taken down my books on Smashwords and Draft2Digital, closed my accounts and also closed my XinXii. I don’t remember making any sales that way. I’ve probably sold more paper books by hand than I have online.
My attention, if not my fiction, deserves better. Soon I’ll remove the books from Amazon – another market filled with random rivals, especially now their algorithm sucks.
And there we have the crux of my deliberate absence. I have no new fiction to share, no customers to entice (or pester). In simplifying my online life I’ve enriched the life offline, although many people might find that difficult to fathom – this household is still shielding, when all other shielding has dropped.
Flu season is upon us. Fingers crossed.
Gales tugged at the house for two days in the run-up to the equinox; apples thrashed from the trees. Not long now, I suspect, until the first cold night does for the tomato plants. I’ll lift them now and let them hang in the potting shed, ripening slowly, each one a little sweet remembrance of summer.
Rain, too, hammering on the windows. Not enough to compensate for the year’s paucity; not yet. Some plants have taken on the challenge and produced a late burst of promise – fresh flowers on the strawberries, a flush of brambles in the hedge.
My second-hand copy of The Country Diary Of An Edwardian Lady tells me nothing useful about Septembers past – the writer was holidaying in Scotland, whose climate is much different to where I live now. Only at the last does she return to the Midlands of England to find – as this month –
“some of the beech trees are quite bare, the leaves having shrivelled up and fallen off… due to the long drought.”
– Edith Holden, 1906
When I lived on the coast, we always saw storms around equinox. Higher seas, colliding with moon phases, soaked the fields and often spread shingle from the beach across the seaside road in town.
Strange debris cast up from the depths, or swept from elsewhere on the coast by odd currents, arrived in the tiny cove I used to visit. Seaglass. Shoes, solitary, with platform soles in gaudy shades of pink and blue. Sometimes a sodden message in a bottle. Here Be Monsters.
Now there are at least Twelve Hours Of The Night. Sleep lasts longer into the morning, birdsong at six instead of four.
Looking at my records I note that sometime in the next week we’ll light a fire, if the nights are cooler, so I’ll make a trip to the logstore and bring in a basket of them. Summer’s heat and drought has dried them too, almost perfectly. The scent of sap slowly caramelising in the sun is delicious.
What writing have I done in this new time of lazy updates? Not much. My days are filled with crafts and gardening and household maintenance, while there’s time. Story ideas come and go but few seem worth pursuing.
Friends visit, showing off new books. I’m happy for them. Perhaps one day I’ll have a book to share with them, a prize worth waiting for.
For now, the workbench beckons. Hands, tools, brain, ideas, creative expression in wood or metal, instead of writing.
Perhaps that’s enough.
As it’s a special time of year, here’s a few links:
The batik art in this post is by M J Scandlin, an accomplished mixed-media artist, graphic designer, and illustrator from the USA (https://www.mjscandin.com/).
The Norfolk Wildlife Trust is bringing the past back to life, quite literally, by scraping the infill out of one “ghost” pingo after another, to “…expose the old store of seeds of lost wetlands … and [restore] with the plants the habitat for a vast array of … freshwater wildlife”
– The Lost Ponds of Norfolk. (https://www.norfolkwildlifetrust.org.uk/LostPonds)
What is a pingo? (not to be confused with Pingu :-)) More here – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingo
And finally, because it’s traditional: Équinoxe by Jean-Michel Jarre. Intricate musical weavings from 1978; best listen on stereo headphones while sound swooshes from one ear to the other.
[I miss writing about the weather – typical Briton. I also miss formulating my words into proper posts, with carefully-chosen art, rather than having only a jumble of offline musings to sift through in search of weather records. So here we go again.]
Moon to moon, July delivered more rainfall than the whole of the solstice-to-solstice before. A cooler month, too, than June – a blessing much in keeping with last year*, and not the year before. Now halfway through August, that dry spell has resumed, not as hot.
Suddenly, after waiting worriedly from first blossom, the garden was alive with butterflies and wasps, all feasting on swollen, bird-pecked fruit. Little blighters. Peacock butterflies here for the first time, and Gatekeepers; and I’m not the only Old Lady in the garden any more.
Underfoot the ground is still dry. The topmost layer is damp, sticking to the soles of my boots as I walk the woodland path, but where the badgers dig I see dry soil deep down.
Of course, the soil underfoot still soaks up the sun’s rays, even through clouds and in less-than-summery temperatures. That warmth supports tender plants such as tomatoes and squash, while the dry atmosphere helps reduce mildew. Next door’s jasmine runs rampant over the fence.
Trees hold more resilience against heat and drought in their trunks, solid reservoirs of liquid, and their deep root systems able to reach far below the surface. Part of that magic is the soil structure, the web of interactions between roots and mycorrhizia that help suspend water molecules in microscopic form.
But the trees need to be well-established, the soil undisturbed, the roots deep and fuelled for exploration when the top levels of the soil dry out. I spent the first summer here watering a tiny avenue of apple trees before I went to work, and watering again when I came home, seeing the grass beyond and around them turn the colour of sand.
The little trees survived that first hot summer and keep returning from their winter sleep. It’s hard to kill off an apple tree, it seems.
I often wonder at the ancient apple forests that pockmarked Mongolia, and fed the wild Przewalski’s horses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przewalski’s_horse) of the Upper Palaeolithic. Archaeology provides us with the frozen bodies of Scyth maidens, but none of the economy beyond the horse.
Sometimes, a steppe is not a steppe, not all there is between the ocean and the sea. Those forests gave us apple trees that contain multitudes, a genetic heritage of such abundance that apple trees from pips are crazy breeds.
I’ve half a dozen shoulder-high, in pots; the offspring of common apples, the pips saved from the cores of discarded corporate lunches. In some ways when I worked beyond the reach of natural light, saving apple pips was one way I could picture a different life.
An apple a day works out at 365 a year. The trees throw more than that at me. I’ve taken the advice of older gardeners – Bob Flowerdew for one – and picked off fruit that’s scabbed, infested, tiny or warped. I’m still left with far too many to eat one a day. They’ll keep.
The pantry fills with jam. I start to run out of jam-jars. I wish I’d kept the odd-shaped ones I put into the recycling over Christmas, the ones that came with preserved figs or clementines in syrup and had lids which wouldn’t fit my normal jars.
As problems go, I’m blessed.
I’m grateful for this abundance.
Grateful to the gardener who planted the trees many years ago, and the owners before us who kept them in place. Grateful for bees and wasps to pollinate the late flowers, thirsty as if waiting took all their patience. Grateful for the small birds flitting between the branches, picking insects off the twigs.
Grateful for the rain, from moon to moon.
*Previous summer posts:
July 2024: Sugar (https://leemcaulay.wordpress.com/2024/07/28/sugar/)
August 2023: Fruits (https://leemcaulay.wordpress.com/2023/08/13/fruits/)
July 2022: Awaiting The Heat (https://leemcaulay.wordpress.com/2022/07/17/awaiting-the-heat/)
Friends and strangers on the internet, I give up. I’ve maintained this streak of posting once a week for more than three years, and I’m bored. You may have noticed.
You may also have noticed a distinct lack of published output written recently. Ten years is a long time to maintain a blog about my writing when I’m not actually writing.
In part, I began posting here as a result of self-publishing, back in 2009. I’d joined ROW80 (https://aroundofwordsin80days.wordpress.com/ A Round of Words in 80 Days: The Writing Challenge That Knows You Have A Life), posting twice-weekly updates on writing projects as part of a group of supportive writers in a similar position.
Well, it isn’t 2010 any more, and I left that community some time in the mid-twenty-teens – the gloss had worn off the whole activity for me. Those who had more success were more pro-active in submitting work to publications, constantly marketing on social media, making more of an effort. I had other priorities (like, sleep).
I haven’t sold many books, didn’t even when I was writing full-speed trying to accelerate away from my Day Job. And maybe it’s time to retire from self-publishing – to remove my books from the marketplace, and reduce by a teeny amount the rate by which data centres are melting the ice caps. It’s been fun, but does it have to be anything more? Hobbies don’t have to be monetised.
Is writing – making a living as a novelist – an ambition I’ve outgrown? The younger self looked upon writing as a means of avoiding a Day Job. But professional writers very definitely view writing as a Day Job, often with more involvement than your normal 9-to-5 desk job. Sounds like… work. And I left that behind some time ago. As Ermine says:
“The You that stepped out of work for the last time will not be the retired You [five years later].”
(https://simplelivingsomerset.wordpress.com/2025/06/05/enough-its-a-feeling-not-a-number/)
Indeed.
Why expose my fiction – and other writing – to the scraping that goes on, even ignoring AI/LLMs grabbing everything like some Conquistador bringing gunpowder to a world that knows none?
I’m even considering the drastic action of removing my books from online marketplaces. I wouldn’t be the first writer to do so. It might even simplify my life – no more emails about upcoming seasonal sales (out of which have come no “sales” ever), and I stopped checking my numbers years ago.
This all sounds like I’ve ceased to care, doesn’t it? Hmm. Like the t-shirt says.
RETIRED
don’t ask me to do a damn thing
Perhaps fiction writing was a way to escape the Day Job after all. And now the Day Job’s ended, I no longer need to disappear into a story, like Robert Jackson Bennett in lockdown:
“[writing] was one of the few things I had… throughout the whole of that strange, dreadful period”
If I stop writing, even on here, will that bother me? There’s one way to find out.
I’ll still check in here from time to time, mostly to brush away the spiders. Expect posts at Yule, and Earth Day, but not much else. Life beyond the screen beckons with all the urgency of ripe berries in the summer sun, and I hear the siren call “in the deep heart’s core”. Toodle-pip.
First, let me admit that my knowledge of dinosaurs is ancient – limited to the level of pre-1990 primary schoolchildren. Before DNA-based genetics, before machine learning, before all the palaeontology of the last forty years showed us more of how parts of the past might have looked.
Not so ancient, however, as the dinosaurs in my family’s copy of The Children’s Encyclopaedia, a pre-WW2 copy that has a strong Presbyterian bias in its writing, and betrays its early-20th-Century restrictions. Their entire history of Earth lasts only 72 million years, and life on the planet only half that, which means their dinosaurs don’t go extinct with the Chixculub asteroid because they didn’t exist until millions of years after.
The world ninety years ago was not just a copy of this with more horses and no television.
In part, my musings on dinosaurs have been piqued by watching the bird-life in my garden. Mostly eating the strawberries, I must admit. There’s a reason William Morris called his most popular pattern “The Strawberry Thief”…
I used to think all garden birds were much the same, and likewise waterfowl, all getting along with each other in their element and all scared of the same predators. Now, after actively watching for a few hours, I’m sure they’re not at all similar – in fact, there’s probably a difference between each variety of small garden birds as great as between us and chimpanzees, or humans and meerkats.
Robins and blackbirds and sparrows all fight over the bird-bath; robins and finches and tits all scrabble over the birdfeeder. I’ve seen coots peck at ducklings; geese and swans not so much fighting as edging round each other cautiously. But, ornithologist I amn’t.
Pigeons here seem to wake up about an hour after the other birds, as if they’re slow on the uptake, not morning people at all.
Before the sun’s properly up, light just pale at the eastern horizon, the wee birds start their magical song, warbling across the gardens behind the house. An hour later, asking where all the coffee went and is there any chance of having the newspaper now, the pigeons land on the roof of the shed without their slippers and start the day’s hoo-hoo-hooing.
Even the magpies don’t seem to like it – clattering loudly like pan-lids in a busy kitchen, or mediaeval milkmaids in pattens walking across the cobbled kail-yard to the cowshed.
Boom-boom, go the pigeons, a throaty signal they’ve spotted the kale. Down they drop into the vegetable patch, plodding around, head bobbing as they toddle back and forth.
Small birds swoop through the gaps to pick at beasties on the ground, or on the underside of leaves. The brassicas are tall enough now that the sparrows can’t shred the lowest leaves, and they’re too frit to hop higher.
I’ve placed wire netting over the brassica bed; the pigeons go hungry.
Another insight into my musings was provided by an image of a giant prehistoric penguin skeleton – “A Map for Our Tour of the Penguin Skeleton” on March of the Fossil Penguins – (https://fossilpenguins.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/a-map-for-our-tour-of-the-penguin-skeleton/).
The birds, and I presume this applies to modern-day penguins too (insert picture of Feathers McGraw here), have long necks that balance on top of a very muscular spine. If it wasn’t for all that blubber under their skin, they’d look more like gannets on their hind legs (yes, I know birds only have two legs, permit me this flight of fancy).
Now, follow me here… Once upon a time there were long-necked land dinosaurs, with feet – and more importantly, pelvises – that suggest they walked on all fours, in the same way as elephants and hippos. Waddled, in fact. With big heavy long tails to keep themselves balanced, so their long necks (the dinosaurs, not the hippos) could reach high into tree canopies for food – like giraffes – or deep underwater.
In the first Jurassic Park film we see how that food has (been imagined to) ended up on the other side of a dinosaur digestive system. (Another aside here – via botanist James Wong – avocados developed to be eaten whole by giant sloths, in handfuls, and the avocado pits/stones deposited in a pile of steaming fertiliser the like of which has not been seen since the giant sloths became extinct, which is why avocado stones often germinate in compost heaps, even in cold climates that an avocado tree can’t possibly survive…)
But we I don’t know how those any dinosaurs communicated with one another.
Popular science programmes like the BBC’s Walking With Dinosaurs – and many dinosaur films – show the meat-eating predator Tyrannosaurus rex roaring with the noise of a ten-ton lion in chain-mail fed through a wood-chipper. But crocodiles and alligators don’t roar like that: the closest description of the noise they make is a chirp. Or a tiny squeaky hinge that needs oiling.
What would herbivore dinosaurs have sounded like? Again, popular entertainment likes to suggest they sung like our more melodious birds, trilling a sweet chorus of many notes and charming butterflies out of the orchids. But only small birds sing like this. Larger birds produce more strident calls – consider the boom of a bittern, or the honking of geese, or the weird miaow of a peacock.
So, of all the possible voices for those big waddling dinosaurs, I suggest they might have sounded like wood pigeons.
Entirely conjecture on my part.
But I see images of Brontosaurus and Diplodocus all fleshed up and compare them to my backyard pigeons, and I see a direct link.
Imagine: pairs of lovesick, hungry Brontosaurus booming that hoo-hoo-hoo call across wide river valleys, waddling through thick tropical forests searching for giant kale, driving all the other dinosaurs bonkers. Especially at odd hours of the day.
The asteroid probably couldn’t come soon enough.
(Of course, now I’ve written this, I expect to find it reproduced as gospel by the various A I thieves across the internet… let me know if you spot it, won’t you? Although I’ll be mortified…)
The Cuckoo Club Archives 